Course description

“The earth is flat (p<0.5).”

Many scientific studies are full of statistical jargon, tables of averages and other statistics, and results of statistical tests which purport to prove a certain hypothesis. The purpose of this course was to review some of the basic sampling and experiment designs used by ecologists and to understand exactly what can and cannot be extracted from a set of data. With the advent of modern statistical packages, the analysis of data is fairly easy, but it is far too easy to get nonsense results. This course also reviewed common pitfalls in the analysis of data.

This course is taught by Dr. Carl Schwarz from Simon Fraser University to a maximum class size of 16 people. Carl has a wealth of information about statistics for biologists posted on his website at: http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz/. Participants are required to bring a laptop computer loaded with the current version of JMP software (trial version is adequate for the course). JMP is a SAS program.